If you were going to get a gaming machine for today and the future... which OS would you pick?

I've been someone out of PC gaming for a while now, preferring to play older games on a Netbook that has served me well. However, it just isn't powerful enough to play some of the games that I'd like to play, such as the sequals to the X franchise and so I'm looking at picking up a new PC in the future with gaming in mind. And not just older titles, I'd like it to be powerful enough to run any game today.

This is largely a hardware issue, granted, but the OS itself will come into it. Is windows XP still supported on new games releases? A quick web search on Dungeon Siege 3 shows that game supports it (I'm fond of the original Dungeon Siege and still have that). Or do other forum members swear by Windows 7?

If you were going to get a gaming machine for today and the future... which OS would you pick?

I've been someone out of PC gaming for a while now, preferring to play older games on a Netbook that has served me well. However, it just isn't powerful enough to play some of the games that I'd like to play, such as the sequals to the X franchise and so I'm looking at picking up a new PC in the future with gaming in mind. And not just older titles, I'd like it to be powerful enough to run any game today.

This is largely a hardware issue, granted, but the OS itself will come into it. Is windows XP still supported on new games releases? A quick web search on Dungeon Siege 3 shows that game supports it (I'm fond of the original Dungeon Siege and still have that). Or do other forum members swear by Windows 7?

7 all the way. I see no reason whatsoever for XP.
The fact that xp doesn't support DX 10 or 11 should be enough in itself. Your gonna want them more and more in the future especially if your getting quite a powerfull system.

If you're building a system with the future in mind, installing a legacy OS that's 10 years old is just silly, especially when it's end of life is rapidly approaching. Windows 7, its a no brainer. Usually better performance and always better features. "Modern" and "XP" shouldn't even be in the same sentence.

XP is a decade old and is on life supprt… XP can't even utilize modern hardware as efficient as Vista for that matter…

Thanks for the replies, you're helping to push me towards Windows 7, which I know has a good reputation. I'm a fan of Windows XP - the third OS that Microsoft really got right in my experience (the other two being Windows 95* and Windows 2000) - and continue to run it to this day.

I really appreciate the advice from everyone here, so a big thanks.

*Messing about with config.sys and autoexec.bat and custom startup disks to get Moonstone - and others - working - excepted!

Windows XP is supriorlly faster then W7 (Anyone that tells you otherwise is an IDIOT as W7 has much more processing, more security etc.) but Windows XP has less security, less multi-thread/core compatibility, no DirectX 10 or 11 support, and drivers aren't designed to be optimised for XP anymore, plus it's old, go with W7 and dual boot XP if you need it for old games like dungeon keeper, etc.

Windows 7. I've not run into a game that doesn't run under it, and typically get a faster framerate than XP too. XP might clock in a hair faster than 7 in raw CPU performance on a synthetic benchmark just because 7 is doing more under the hood.. real world/gaming using XP is noticably slower. Even old stuff from the Windows 95 era runs, and for the really old stuff there's DOSBox. No dual booting required, zero need for XP. For the new features there's no point even considering XP anymore as it just won't run on XP.

Or you could be smart about it and buy WINDOWS 7 PRO which comes with XP MODE which essentially is a free copy of XP inside a virtual machine.

P.S: To the guy above, XP in no way shape or form is faster than 7 ive done the testing and its not even close.

You do understand how code is executed on a processor right, in that, more code to run = takes more time?Now then, compare the code that's in windows 7 to windows XP, windows 7 has MUCH more features which comes at a cost of execution code space increasing.

CPUs have things like 256KB L2 cache's for storing 256KB of instructions at a time, now, if you agree with physics, common sense and what we've been relying on for the whole of humanity, you too will agree that less executable code will execute faster than larger executable code thus making windows XP faster and quicker to run itself than windows 7.